A truly hilarious video from "Talkshow with Spike Fereston" is making the rounds on the internet.
You need to watch the video before any of this post makes sense. With that said, here it goes folks.
The video demonstrates how truly stupid the February 2009 digital "cutoff" is, a government mandated technological change that will have the most negative effect on the most vulnerable - mostly poor and dependent people.
There is no logical reason not to continue analog TV broadcasts for another five years while people discover that another choice for broadcast TV has been developing and actually represents something desirable. The cutoff is a move by the covetous, enabled by a bunch of mostly old men in Congress several years ago who either (1) really don't care much about what happens in the day-to-day lives of mostly poor and dependent people or (2) are just too dumb to see the big picture.
The video clearly presents the absurdity of the policy. Yeah, there are phone numbers in addition to web sites, and government coupons that are confusing and don't cover help with installation, and boxes that may or may not work in your location. None of that resolves the fundamental flaws in the policy.
Many are going to be surprised. No one took their "land lines" away from them before they began to appreciate the value of the cell phone, and most still have land lines. Before this video, I never saw anything in the new, spiffy media that truly addressed the impact of this change.
Unfortunately, some have gotten hung up because the video using humor portrays the difficulty affecting a member of the population that will have the most members struggling - old people, people my age.
Some have taken offense that the character is portrayed as an "elderly, almost senile woman." Senile. The term is applied to older people and it means a deterioration, an illness, which as we age we all fear more or less.
In fact, a better term has entered the lexicon more recently to describe what is depicted in the video: "clueless", which means "Lacking understanding or knowledge." (Dictionary.com). The problem is "clueless" behavior at any age resembles to some degree "senility." It's just that old people get tagged with "senility" when they are just "clueless", which is ageism and is as disturbing as overt racism, sexism, etc.
In this case, an older person was used because a greater percentage of people over 60 are "technologically challenged" than in other age groups. Don't let your internal "politically correct" alarm stand in the way of understanding the basic message of the video. The person portrayed in the video is not senile, just clueless, and it has nothing to do with ageism.
The February 2009 analog TV cutoff will affect people of all ages most of whom are among the least able to cope with the change and who are most dependent on broadcast TV. And this humorous video brings that truth out of the closet.
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